The current company I work for has been without a Crystal Reports and BI report developer for over a year now and I have been asked to be trained in the two subjects. I am looking for anywhere I can get a basic understanding of what I am getting in to before the training. I believe the training will mainly focus on developing reports along with just having a small understand with what happens on the back end. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Some handy formulas and overall viewKen Hamady
Pluralsight guide is pretty good. ( paid but check microsoft dev essentials)
General tips: save often, backup, supress sections or fields on condition, use the lines on both rulers to help with formating. Also keep in mind the requriments for the specific report, where information can grow in the future, test diferent scenarios.
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I have completed Crystal Reports 2011 for developers and i am ready to move onto the next stage
I would like to learn ways of doing complicated reports ( as that is my job now ).
Is there a good advanced or intermediate book out there on formulas
and one on charts , these are the two areas i wish to develop
any help would be appreciated
Thank you so much
I am in charge of all metrics reporting where I work. I write and maintain all of our Crystal Reports. Here are two books you should look at.
Crystal Reports XI: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)
No Stress Tech Guide To Crystal Reports XI For Beginners (2nd Edition)
Both of these books have good sections on formulas. The second book has a pretty good section on Charts. The rest of it might be a little basic for you, but it's a fairly good reference book.
Both can be found on Amazon.com
If you want to get even deeper on the formulas, learn visual basic. Just search visual basic for crystal reports and you'll find a wealth of resources.
Good luck!
I have been struggling for days with a crystal report now. No one can answer my query on stack overflow so is there anywhere I can get some developer support for crystal.
Ideally I want a business objects developer to connect to my machine, look at my code and tell me why the database name refuses to change in any of the examples crystal have provided.
If anyone knows of anyone offering this kind of service, or has some working code to change the database of a crystal report at runtime.
I have asked the question at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4723903/crystal-report-pain-cant-seem-to-change-database
Why is something that should be so simple such a waste of time!?
Part of the problem with your other question is that you didn't include the "Crystal-reports" tag, just the "Crystal-reports 2008" tag. The former is more common and gives you a much wider audience. Fixed.
This doesn't happen too often, but your other question is actually giving users a case of "information overload". I did a print preview and it came out to 7 pages. Can you cut back on some of the code? (Yes, you might accidently omit the real source of the problem, but that's just life)
Paid consultants may be more dedicated to finding the answer, but he/she isn't necessarily smarter. Try the official support page # http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/support. If you purchase a "maintenance agreement" with SAP, you'll get exactly the professional support you're looking for.
(After all this talking, I'd like to just answer your question and be done with it, but I don't know ASP.)
You could also try BOB.
I've migrated our company reports from Crystal to SSRS. I'm wondering if there exists a way to perform automatic quality assurance test on the newly implemented reporting service against the running Crystal reports? Since both solutions drain from the same data-source, we're concern about the correctness of the data (including raw and computed). Please kindly advise.
Thanks & regards,
William Choi
You would need some tool that would be able to parse both sets of reports and compare.
The only way I can imagine would be if both could be exported to excel and compared there.
But I doubt that is going to work all that well, based on my limited experience of exporting Crystal reports.
I want design and use reports for my .NET windows application. I use Crystal Reports to design reports, but Crystal Reports is very slow when my report shows.
What is the best software to design and view reports for .NET application?
I'm looking for design-time software and not runtime reporting tools.
The fact that your report displays slowly has nothing to do with the ease of use, at design or runtime, of a reporting tool.
You should look at what indexes are present and whether you can simplify the underlying data query.
The 'best' anything depends somewhat on your requirements.
That all said, I personally prefer Active Reports over Crystal.
Please take a look at Windward Reports (I'm the CTO at Windward). With Windward you design the reports in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint so layout/formatting is very fast & easy. And because you can place the tags for the data anywhere, it gives you the ability to do things that Crystal, SSRS, etc. find difficulty to impossible.
As to performance issues, there are some good general rules of thumb at How to Turbo-Charge your Report Speed.
thanks - dave
I've heard of "Crystal Reports" for years, but I'm really confused why a small ActiveX type of component that just displays and prints out data from databases (does it?) should be considered a whole product within the VS suite of products.
Is it something better, like something for Windows Server that lets you generate report server-side as PDFs or similar which is why its considered so important?
Enlighten me.
Crystal Reports is a very robust (and in many developers' opinions, complicated and painful) tool to build complex reports. It's much more than simply printing what's in the database - taking relational data and transforming it into massive corporate reports with hundreds or thousands of conditions is very time-consuming and difficult. For example, what if the report needs to have product summary sections which can be formatted completely differently based on the qualities or attributes of the product? CR has a scripting model that permits pretty much any transformation imaginable.
To replace Crystal Reports with something you seem to be imagining, would require a data transformation engine; an end-user-friendly UI to write transformation rules and design reports; and a presentation engine to format the reports in a print-friendly way. That definitely sounds like a full-fledged product to me.
The worst thing about CR is that there isn't anything better at what it does.
If what you want to do is what it "likes" to do--dump data from the DB into a formatted page--it's dead simple. If you're willing to tolerate pain & frustration, you can make it do all sorts of fancy things.
It's definitely more than just "an ActiveX control".
It's a whole product because it is supplied as such by the developer, and is installed only optionally. It enables support for Crystal Report files.
And no, it's not a small ActiveX type of component. It comes with a full-fledged report designer and runtime component and is a complete report solution, much like SSRS (SQL Server Report Services, or something - is that what you meant with the thing for Windows Server?). Have look at their web page for more information.
The Crystal Reports that come with Visual Studio are a 'lite' version of the suite of products , see this page for comparison of features between the full and lite versions of 2008
You should try Stimulsoft Reports.Net its better than CR.NET.In this solution there are no ActiveX involved and no merge module and runtimes....
One of the cool things they added was support for binding to .NET and other data providers. This company has been bought by so many companies in the past it has really hurt the product IMO.
Crystal Report is a third part "Reprot Creation" tool.
This comes as build-in with Visual Studio IDE, and using this tool you can create reports in your application.
Its a reporting tool that has a stand alone application for generating reports or reports can be integrated into a .net application.